Videos by American Songwriter
Meet Barak Hill, the Springfield, Missouri singer-songwriter who beat four other finalists and a host of entrants to win our Santa Cruz Guitar video contest — he’ll be taking home a new Santa Cruz 1929-00 acoustic guitar. The contest asked participants to upload a video of themselves performing a song to YouTube — the video that received the the most “likes” won.
“Building the Tin Man” was inspired by this kind of morbid back-story for the character of the Tin Man that Frank L. Baum dropped into one of his Oz books,” Hill tells American Songwriter.”It’s a love story that doesn’t end happily at all. And, to me, at it’s core it’s about losing focus and putting things like work above the person you love. I thought it was a fantastic story and I’d had the idea to write a song around it for a few days. I finally sat down to write it in a hotel room in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Some songs take me weeks to write—this one came out in about 30 minutes. Songs that have that spontaneity and seem to almost write themselves like that always wind up being my favorites.
Watch Hill’s winning video below.
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